Are helium hard drives good?

Helium has been one of the greatest breakthroughs for high-capacity hard drives (HDDs). Being seven times lighter than air, helium creates less drag and turbulence when HDD platters spin. It runs at cooler temperatures, and when sealed, it keeps out humidity.

What is a helium HDD?

A helium drive is a hard disk that exploits the characteristic lightness of that gas to increase the medium’s potential speed and storage density. Potential speed and density are increased because helium, which is less dense than air, creates less drag and turbulence.

Which hard drives use helium?

The first helium-filled hard drive (6-TB capacity) drive was made commercially available by HGST, a Western Digital subsidiary, in November, 2013. Today, several hard drive manufacturers, Including Western Digital, Seagate and Toshiba offer helium hard disk drives.

How long do helium hard drives last?

Yes, the helium eventually leaks. It was a major technical challenge to sufficiently seal these drives for a typical expected lifespan of 5 years. They achieved that. Nidec targeted “at least 5 years” without leaks.

Are helium drives quieter?

For example, helium-filled hard drives are quieter. This means that less energy is used and according to Backblaze, helium-filled drives will use 20% less energy than your average hard drive.

Which Seagate drives are helium?

Seagate is launching a trio of 12TB hard drives today with a focus on the consumer market. The 3.5” drives build upon the ‘PMR platters in a helium-filled enclosure’ platform used in the 10 TB consumer hard drives released last year.

What are the characteristics of an SSD?

SSDs have no spinning platters, moving read/write heads or any other moving parts common to traditional mechanical hard disks. Instead, data is stored in integrated circuits. An SSD’s solid-state design means you don’t have to worry about losing data because of platter crashes or mechanical failure.

Why is there a helium shortage?

The US monopoly on helium caused a shortage, forcing others to turn to using highly-flammable hydrogen as their lifting gas. Today, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) oversees the remaining government helium reserves, which as of October 1st 2019, contained 2,809,679 Mcf.

Is WD gold helium-filled?

The 8TB WD Gold datacenter drive is one of the few hard disk drives in the market to feature the revolutionary HGST HelioSeal technology. It is hermetically sealed at the factory, and filled with helium.

Which WD Red drives are helium-filled?

WD Red 10TB NAS Hard Drive Designed with Western Digital’s HelioSeal® helium-technology, the WD Red 10TB hard drive provides higher capacity and performance to meet the increasing storage needs of always-on, single-to-8-bay NAS systems.

Which is the first helium filled hard drive?

In addition to being the world’s first helium-filled hard drive, HGST Ultrastar He6 is also the first hard drive in the industry to offer a 6-terabyte capacity. This design delivers a 50% capacity gain and still reduces the energy needed to run the drive by up to 23%

How big is the Ultrastar helium hard drive?

The Helium drives began to ship the following year in November and as of last month, HGST has deployed over a million drives. We had previously reviewed the Ultrastar He6 6TB helium drive. Now HGST has taken their helium technology and expanded capacity even further with the Ultrastar Helium He8 8TB Enterprise Hard Drive.

When did the HGST helium He8 hard drive come out?

The He8 is available in either SAS 12Gb/s or SATA 6Gb/s interface. The drives offer a spindle speed of 7,200RPM, on disk buffer of 128MB and drive sustained throughput of 205MB/s. Back in September 2012, HGST first announced their Helium Hard Drive Platform.

How big is a helium 8TB hard drive?

Not only that, the newest helium drives bump the capacity up to 8TB (33% more than 6TB drives) and it has more use cases than Shingled Magnetic Recording drives. The main area of focus for He8 sales would be enterprise and datacenters where density and capacity are paramount and weighed against TCO.